Table Talk With Jeremy Wayne: Old-world Italian cuisine and all that Chazz

We have an Italian theme this week – a story from Naples, Italy, in my now bi-monthly Travel Talk column, and a visit here to actor Chazz Palminteri’s eponymous restaurant in White Plains.  

Born Calogero Lorenzo Palminteri in the Bronx, the actor, filmmaker and writer (“A Bronx Tale,” “Bullets Over Broadway,” “The Usual Suspects,” “Modern Family”) now makes his home in Bedford. Like colleagues Robert DiNiro, Richard Gere and George Clooney, he has pursued a second career in the restaurant business, though he is hardly washing the dishes. 

Palminteri’s restaurant, which opened a couple of years back on Main Street, spins off of the restaurant he established on West 46th Street in Manhattan in 2015. As you enter, great slabs of meat – chateaubriand, New York sirloin and the like – greet you from their display case, reminiscent of any trattoria worth its salt in Florence, home to the fiorentina steak cooked over charcoal. It’s an encouraging start. So are the flavorful black olives, the nubs of Parmesan and the excellent warm house-baked bread, covered with a napkin and brought to the table within 20 seconds of my being seated. 

Old-fashioned in the best sense, this is an establishment that flaunts dishes heavy with cream, where a delightfully wanton disregard of calories informs the menu. Shrimp Romano (shrimp with spicy pepper in a creamy Gorgonzola sauce); seafood Fra Diavolo (shrimp and lobster on fettucine in a spicy tomato sauce); and that lovely old throwback, Veal Marsala leap out at you from the menu, or at least they leapt out at me. 

Spaghetti and meatballs or beef short rib braised three hours in Barolo and extravagantly served with saffron risotto are other old-school favorites, and apparently best sellers. So’s that chateaubriand displayed in the entryway, priced at an ambitious $120 for two, although I’d immediately counter this by saying that a favorite wine of mine – a Pinot Grigio from Livio Felluga, one of Italy’s top producers, under the “Sommelier’s Selection” – is modestly priced at only $65. So draw whatever conclusions you will from that. 

Let’s talk more about that wine list, which as you might expect tilts heavily towards Italy, especially Tuscany and so-called Super-Tuscans. That said, I did very well with a humble wine called Le Rime from Banfi in Tuscany, an easy match for wines twice its price. 

Classic cocktails start at $14, and there is a daily Happy Hour from 4 to 7 p.m. 

Back to the grub. Baked clams, six of them in the shell, are properly garlicky, but the ratio of breadcrumbs to clam was perhaps a little too great, so that we had was a kind of thick, clam-flavored soup. 

Similarly, pappardelle Bolognese, which arrived with a veritable basil bush by way of decoration, relied a little too much on its tomato sauce. It was a perfectly nice and certainly hearty dish, but at the risk of sounding pretentious, I would venture the Bolognesi would likely have cooked this sauce off for a couple of hours longer to reduce and intensify it. (As the late, great Marcella Hazan observed in her classic tome, “Essentials of Italian Cooking”:  “While we cannot hope to exactly reproduce Bolognesi dishes away from Bologna, with a little effort, we make it very close.” That effort, Hazan goes on to say, involves a cooking time of “three hours, but five is better.”) 

A request to the kitchen for an additional entrée, at 9:04 p.m., four minutes after the kitchen had closed, was met with a refusal. To be fair, we had been warned a few minutes before the hour that the kitchen would close at 9, and understandably rules are rules, but inflexibility is never an attractive trait. 

Going against my better judgement and ordering a dessert of tiramisu, versions of which have ranged from the incredible to the frankly inedible over the years, I must say all crimes committed in its name were forgiven this time around, all faith restored. This was a triumph of a dessert, a gorgeous square of soaked ladyfingers, sweet rich cream, coffee and mascarpone. 

Vested, white sprinted waiters made sure the show ran smoothly, though the well-intentioned but endless inquires as to whether we were enjoying ourselves bordered on the – how shall we say? – repetitive. As for the room, it is spacious and welcoming with “chocolate box” scenes of Italy and retro black-and-white prints covering the ochre walls, a veritable galaxy of spotlights providing mood lighting. 

Any minor quibbles about Bolognese cooking times aside and any minor kitchen inflexibility forgiven, it would be hard to think of a more convivial spot to dine at with friends in Westchester.  

For more, visit chazzpalminteri.com.